Tag: hiking

Of fur and feathers

This is not my rabbit, this oblong figure of fur plump on the snow where the ground slides off into a gully of scraggly alders, dogwood, and honeysuckle. I’m a mile from home, too far from the rabbit’s home range of only an acre or so. So, no, this is not the rabbit under my birdfeeder every night.

It has, however, been eating well. It is a big cottontail, and it doesn’t seem too concerned about moving that big body—perhaps 4 pounds—just for me. I guess we’re friends; this encounter has been happening day after day when I trek the trail on snowshoes.

The rabbit just sits there like a watermelon with ears, sometimes sideways to me, other times facing me, only yards away.Sometimes it stands as if to query me. I bid for a reaction with inane questions: Have you brushed and flossed your incisors today? Have you combed your fur? Wanna carrot?  No response, just a cautious stare from large brown eyes, processing if I’m a curious visitor or lurking danger.

Oh, those large eyes, “soft, dark, and brown,” like the line from a Lovin’ Spoonful song.  A rabbit’s eyes are placed high atop the sides of its head, providing a 320-degree field of vision, the only blind spots directly behind and for a few inches in front. The big cottontail I’m watching has no trouble seeing me even when it’s not facing me.

I move to the foot bridge above a dry creek. With blobs of snow on the bed rocks, I’m looking down on a mosaic of white, gray and black. Keeping with the color scheme, a chickadee flits below me from one branch to another, climbing as it might be, up the steep bank.

The chickadee comes close, all five inches and half-ounce of it. “Fee-bee, fee-bee.” It is just below eye level, on a branch about six feet away. I study it, and take photos. The black-capped chickadee wears a black cap, of course, on its roundish head with a black throat. Its cheeks are white, as is its nape, from which a little white spills raggedly onto its gray back. Wing feathers have distinct stripes of white, gray and black.

From this vantage point of a chickadee’s back, I see only a rim of its belly extending beyond the wings. The creamy belly down I can see has hints of rust. The black, rounded split tail is trimmed with gray.  

A cottontail and a chickadee. Ordinary sightings, for sure, but the closer one gets, the more beautiful are our winter neighbors. That includes the blue jay at the bird feeder. Though sometimes scorned for raucous behavior, the blue jay wears an attractive palette of blue, much like a da Vinci landscape rolling across the canvas in endless blues.

The blue jay’s back is ultramarine blue, some say, but others see it as indigo blue. Its wing feathers are Berlin blue, and secondary hues, trimmed in black and white, include the blues China, azure and flax-flower. So pretty, the jay can chase away the winter blues.

From my walk’s close encounters came the inspiration for a new year’s resolution: I will ease even closer to wildlife, recording the astounding details of birds and critters. A year of fur and feathers.

Note: My book, “Soul of the Outdoors,” is available through me, at bookstores, and from online sellers. For a personally-signed book, email davegreschner@icloud.com or text or call me at 715-651-1638. The book is available at bookstores in Rice Lake (Old Bookshop), Eau Claire (Dotters), Menomonie (Dragon Tail), Hudson (Chapter2Books), Spooner (Northwinds), Three Lakes (Mind Chimes), and Bayfield (Honest Dog), and in Duluth, Minn., at The Bookstore at Fitger’s.

Walking the land

Introduction: During this season of giving thanks and giving gifts, I am sharing several excerpts from my book, “Soul of the Outdoors,” which was released last Christmas. For the holiday season, the book is available through me at a special price. See information at the end of this post. The following chapter, “Walking the Land,” is from the November-December segment of the book. Enjoy.

I’d like to think the land remembers my face, my gait, and that I was a friend. Still am. Why else would I keep returning to these woods, pastures, fields, and old farmsteads?

I come here now because I was here as a youth. Growing up here, the land etched in me the tranquility of tall pine trees, amber sunsets beyond fields of green corn, flaming maples, and fox tracks crossing fields of snow.

I nurtured a love for the land and for walking the land. There remains within me a desire to walk out the back door, through the barnyard to the pasture, up the hill and through the woods, across the town road and through the neighbors’ fields, pastures and woods, as I once did. 

Though properties were defined by fences and roads, they remained joined by the land’s flow of hills and valleys and tree lines. And the sweat of settlers.

The land I walked for miles in all directions had different owners, but owners who were not much different from each other. They were farmers bonded to their neighbors by the need for green pastures, healthy crops and livestock, and firewood. Come hunting time there was a sharing of the land to an extent I’ll never see again.

These descendants of immigrant settlers from only a generation or two ago were willing to share. They lived the saying of Native Americans, “Who are we without the corn, the rabbit, the sun, the rain and the deer? Know this, my people, the all does not belong to us. We belong to the all.” 

When I visited this land on a mild, sunny afternoon in early November, I knew I could cross the property of at least one family, for they are the children and grandchildren of my parents’ neighbors a generation ago. From our woodlot, I headed for the huge rock on the adjoining farm we once owned. The rock is in a valley of the pasture, near a small creek at the foot of tall pines. The rock is larger than a chest freezer. It begs one to pause.

I sat on the rock as a kid while exploring, and later as a young man while hunting. In his journal, “In Context,” Native American Kenneth Cooper (Cha-das-ska-dum) wrote that the Lummi tribal members in Washington tell their children, “You sit on this rock, and I’ll come back in a couple of hours, and you tell me what you learned.”

Patience is what children will learn on the rock, and what we all should learn if we take the time to sit under a canopy of tranquility. I sat on the rock for a time and then pushed on to the first deer stand my dad built. The boards are rotting and crumbling. I think I should rip the deer stand down someday. I think I don’t want to.

On this mild afternoon I nestled my back against the trunk of a large maple tree and slid to the ground, letting the sun find my face. I listened to a dog barking in the distance. It could have been my dog decades ago, barking at a treed squirrel from the base of this very tree.

I got up and begin pushing over a series of hardwood hills, crossing the tracks of deer and wild turkeys. I stood in a clearing between woodlots, where as a young photographer I was consumed with the golden leaves of birches against a blue autumnal sky. The birches are still there. And today, so am I.

Note: Want to read more nature essays such as this? Thr0ugh the holiday season, “Soul of the Outdoors” is available through me at the special price of $17. For a personally-signed book, email davegreschner@icloud.com or text or call me at 715-651-1638. The book is also available at regular prices through online book sellers, and at Wisconsin bookstores in Rice Lake (Old Bookshop), Eau Claire (Dotters), Menomonie (Dragon Tail), Hudson (Chapter2Books), Spooner (Northwinds), Three Lakes (Mind Chimes), and Bayfield (Honest Dog), and in Duluth, Minn., at The Bookstore at Fitger’s.